The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (116 page)

31
. Ted Kaczynski, “The Unabomber’s Manifesto,” May 14, 2001,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0182.html
.

32
. Bill McKibben,
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
(New York: Times Books, 2003).

33
. Kaczynski, “The Unabomber’s Manifesto.”

34
. Foresight Institute and IMM, “Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology,” February 21, 1999,
http://www.foresight.org/guidelines/current.html
; Christine Peterson, “Molecular Manufacturing: Societal Implications of Advanced Nanotechnology,” April 9, 2003,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?
main=/articles/art0557.html; Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder, “Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology,” January 28, 2003,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0547.html
; Robert A. Freitas Jr., “The Gray Goo Problem,” KurzweilAI.net, 20 March 2002,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0142.html
.

35
. Robert A. Freitas Jr., private communication to Ray Kurzweil, January 2005. Freitas describes his proposal in detail in Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations.”

36
. Ralph C. Merkle, “Self Replicating Systems and Low Cost Manufacturing,” 1994,
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/selfRepNATO.html
.

37
. Neil King Jr. and Ted Bridis, “FBI System Covertly Searches E-mail,”
Wall Street Journal Online
(July 10, 2000),
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-522071.html?legacy=zdnn
.

38
. Patrick Moore, “The Battle for Biotech Progress—GM Crops Are Good for the Environment and Human Welfare,”
Greenspirit
(February 2004),
http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?msid=62
.

39
. “GMOs: Are There Any Risks?” European Commission (October 9, 2001),
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/biosociety/pdf/
gmo_press_release.pdf
.

40
. Rory Carroll, “Zambians Starve As Food Aid Lies Rejected,”
Guardian
(October 17, 2002),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,813220,00.html
.

41
. Larry Thompson, “Human Gene Therapy: Harsh Lessons, High Hopes,”
FDA Consumer Magazine
(September–October 2000),
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/500_gene.html
.

42
. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”

43
. The Foresight Guidelines (Foresight Institute, version 4.0, October 2004,
http://www.foresight.org/guidelines/current.html
) are designed to address the potential positive and negative consequences of nanotechnology. They are intended to inform citizens, companies, and governments, and provide specific guidelines to responsibly develop nanotechnology-based molecular manufacturing. The Foresight Guidelines were initially developed at the Institute Workshop on Molecular Nanotechnology Research Policy Guidelines, sponsored by the institute and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM), February 19–21, 1999. Participants included James Bennett, Greg Burch, K. Eric Drexler, Neil Jacobstein, Tanya Jones, Ralph Merkle, Mark Miller, Ed Niehaus, Pat Parker, Christine Peterson, Glenn Reynolds, and Philippe Van Nedervelde. The guidelines have been updated several times.

44
. Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Therapeutics, has proposed replacing this moratorium with a regulatory regime in which a new International Xenotrans-plantation Authority inspects and approves pathogen-free herds of genetically engineered pigs as acceptable sources of xenografts. Rothblatt’s solution also helps stamp out rogue xenograft surgeons by promising each country that joins the IXA, and helps to enforce the rules within its borders, a fair share of the pathogen-free xenografts for its own citizens suffering from organ failure. See Martine Rothblatt,
“Your Life or Mine: Using Geoethics to Resolve the Conflict Between Public and Private Interests,” in
Xenotransplantation
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004). Disclosure: I am on the board of directors of United Therapeutics.

45
. See Singularity Institute,
http://www.singinst.org
. Also see note 30 above. Yudkowsky formed the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) to develop “Friendly AI,” intended to “create cognitive content, design features, and cognitive architectures that result in benevolence” before near-human or better-than-human AIs become possible. SIAI has developed The SIAI Guidelines on Friendly AI: “Friendly AI,”
http://www.singinst.org/friendly/
. Ben Goertzel and his Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute have also examined issues related to developing friendly AI; his current focus is on developing the Novamente AI Engine, a set of learning algorithms and architectures. Peter Voss, founder of Adaptive A.I., Inc., has also collaborated on friendly-AI issues:
http://adaptiveai.com/
.

46
. Integrated Fuel Cell Technologies,
http://ifctech.com
. Disclosure: The author is an early investor in and adviser to IFCT.

47
.
New York Times
, September 23, 2003, editorial page.

48
. The House Committee on Science of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on April 9, 2003, to “examine the societal implications of nanotechnology and H.R. 766, the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2002.” See “Full Science Committee Hearing on the Societal Implications of Nanotechnology,”
http://www.house.gov/science/hearings/full03/index.htm
, and “Hearing Transcript,”
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy86340.000/
hsy86340_0f.htm
. For Ray Kurzweil’s testimony, see also
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0556.html
. Also see Amara D. Angelica, “Congressional Hearing Addresses Public Concerns About Nanotech,” April 14, 2003,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/articles/art0558.html
.

Chapter Nine: Response to Critics

1
. Michael Denton, “Organism and Machine,” in Jay W. Richards et al.,
Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I
. (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2002),
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0502.html
.

2
. Jaron Lanier, “One Half of a Manifesto,”
Edge
(September 25, 2000),
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge74.html
.

3
. Ibid.

4
. See chapters 5 and 6 for examples of narrow AI now deeply embedded in our modern infrastructure.

5
. Lanier, “One Half of a Manifesto.”

6
. An example is Kurzweil Voice, developed originally by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence.

7
. Alan G. Ganek, “The Dawning of the Autonomic Computing Era,”
IBM Systems
Journal
(March 2003),
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISJ/is_1_42/
ai_98695283/print
.

8
. Arthur H. Watson and Thomas J. McCabe,“Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric,” NIST special publication 500–35, Computer Systems Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1996.

9
. Mark A. Richards and Gary A. Shaw, “Chips, Architectures and Algorithms: Reflections on the Exponential Growth of Digital Signal Processing Capability,” submitted to
IEEE Signal Processing
, December 2004.

10
. Jon Bentley, “Programming Pearls,”
Communications of the ACM
27.11 (November 1984): 1087–92.

11
.C. Eldering, M. L. Sylla, and J. A. Eisenach, “Is There a Moore’s Law for Bandwidth,”
IEEE Communications
(October 1999): 117–21.

12
. J. W.Cooley and J. W. Tukey, “An Algorithm for the Machine Computation of Complex Fourier Series,”
Mathematics of Computation
19 (April 1965): 297–301.

13
. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons with an estimated interneuronal connection “fan out” of about 1,000, so there are about 100 trillion (10
¹⁴
) connections. Each connection requires at least 70 bits to store an ID for the two neurons at either end of the connection. So that’s approximately 10
¹⁶
bits. Even the uncom-pressed genome is about 6 billion bits (about 10
¹⁰
), a ratio of at least 10
⁶
: 1. See chapter 4.

14
. Robert A. Freitas Jr.,
Nanomedicine
, vol. I,
Basic Capabilities
, section 6.3.4.2, “Bio-logical Chemomechanical Power Conversion” (Georgetown, Tex.: Landes Bioscience, 1999), pp. 147–48,
http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/6.3.4.2.htm#p4
; see illustration at
http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/Figures/6.2.jpg
.

15
. Richard Dawkins, “Why Don’t Animals Have Wheels?”
Sunday Times
, November 24, 1996,
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml
.

16
. Thomas Ray, “Kurzweil’s Turing Fallacy,” in Richards et al.,
Are We Spiritual Machines?

17
. Ibid.

18
. Anthony J. Bell, “Levels and Loops: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
354 (1999): 2013–20,
http://www.cnl.salk.edu/~tony/ptrsl.pdf
.

19
. Ibid.

20
. David Dewey, “Introduction to the Mandelbrot Set,”
http://www.ddewey.net/mandelbrot
.

21
.Christof Koch quoted in John Horgan,
The End of Science
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

22
. Roger Penrose,
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, “Orchestrated Objective Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain
Microtubules: The ‘Orch OR’ Model for Consciousness,”
Mathematics and Computer Simulation
40 (1996): 453–80,
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrosehameroff/orchOR.html
.

23
. Sander Olson, “Interview with Seth Lloyd,” November 17, 2002,
http://www.nanomagazine.com/i.php?id=2002_11_17
.

24
. Bell, “Levels and Loops.”

25
. See the exponential growth of computing graphs in chapter 2 (pp. 67, 70).

26
. Alfred N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell,
Principia Mathematica
, 3 vols. (Cam-bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1912, 1913).

27
. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem first appeared in his “Uber formal unenscheider-bare Satze der
Principia Mathematica
und verwandter Systeme I,”
Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik
38 (1931): 173–98.

28
. Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society
42 (1936): 230–65. The “Entscheidungsproblem” is the decision or halting problem—that is, how to determine ahead of time whether an algorithm will halt (come to a decision) or continue in an infinite loop.

29
.Church’s version appeared in Alonzo Church, “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory,”
American Journal of Mathematics
58 (1936): 345–63.

30
. For an entertaining introductory account of some of the implications of the Church-Turing thesis, see Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(New York: Basic Books, 1979).

31
. The busy-beaver problem is one example of a large class of noncomputable functions, as seen in Tibor Rado, “On Noncomputable Functions,”
Bell System Technical Journal
41.3 (1962): 877–84.

32
. Ray, “Kurzweil’s Turing Fallacy.”

33
. Lanier, “One Half of a Manifesto.”

34
. A human, that is, who is not asleep and not in a coma and of sufficient development (that is, not a prebrain fetus) to be conscious.

35
. John R. Searle, “I Married a Computer,” in Richards et al.,
Are We Spiritual Machines?

36
. John R. Searle,
The Rediscovery of the Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

37
. Hans Moravec, Letter to the Editor,
New York Review of Books
,
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/Searle/searle_response_letter.htm
.